You all probably know that I love baking, but you probably don't know that I absolutely hate making sugar cookies. Sure, I love how they look in the end and I'm a fan of a good sugar cookie, but the time they take... geeesh it's crazy. Sometimes I get a wild hair and decide that I must make some decorated sugar cookies. This happened last week. I couldn't get the thought of pastel Easter egg cookies out of my head and I knew that our niece, Anna would love decorating some when she came over for Easter lunch.
Here's a little rundown of what went into making these cookies: Mainly so I remember how awful the process is and never want to do it again :)
- Saturday morning I made the cookie dough because it has to chill. I use this recipe (I won't use any other recipe, it really is no-fail).
- On our way to family lunch we stopped at Michael's for me to look for Easter egg cookie cutters. They didn't have any of course so I bought a set of metal circles to shape into some eggs. I also bought a big thing of those squeeze bottles so Anna wouldn't have issues with piping bags. (we'll talk about these later)
- After we returned from family time and decorating Easter eggs I rolled all the cookies out and baked them (rolling and cutting sugar cookies is my first frustration with making sugar cookies. It's a process. I'm not good with drawn out processes.
- While the cookies were cooling I started the royal icing. (this recipe) Royal icing is a big pain. Getting the consistency right took me about an hour. Granted if I made the stuff all the time this wouldn't be as big of an ordeal. At this point it was about 8pm.
- Then I had to divide the icing into 6 bowls to make the different colors. I mixed all the colors and then realized the consistency was still a little off. So more water was added to make the flooding consistency right.
- At this point I needed to put the icing in the squeeze bottles I purchased. This was an issue. A funnel wouldn't work because the icing was too thick, so I put all of the icing in ziplock bags clipped the corner and filled the bottles. I normally would have just used my piping bags to keep from wasting ziplocks, but I really did want to make it easier for Anna (and less messy).
- I finally got around to doing the base flooding of icing on the cookies around 11pm. (This is a really good post from Sweetopia about decorating with royal icing.) I put the frosted cookies in my oven (it was on warm then I turned it off before I put the cookies in) to dry faster.
- Around 1:00am I decided I better do the decorating on top of the big cookies so they could be dry and then Anna could decorate the little cookies after lunch. This was the part that I enjoyed the most. All the hours of prep make it almost worth it! I have this same problem with sewing clothes. I love the sewing part but I absolutely hate all the ironing fabric, cutting patterns, cutting fabric, sewing - ironing - sewing - ironing, hemming, etc. I'm a one or two step kind of girl. haha
My flooding icing was somewhat thick enough to decorate the tops with but if I weren't being lazy, I would have made the thicker icing, colored it,separated it out,and thinned down one for flooding but at that point I wanted nothing more to do with cookie making so my decorated tops are a little runny.
Anna had a great time decorating all the little egg cookies.
She put crosses on most of them so everyone could have a cross cookie. I'm so proud of her for knowing and understanding why we celebrate Easter. Good job Anna!
I think she enjoyed eating the cookies more than making them though and I felt the same way!
P.S. I'm somewhat joking about how much I hated making these. It's fun for an every once-in-awhile thing, and it makes me appreciate beautifully decorated sugar cookies a million times more than I already did. Sometimes I just need to tell things like they are. I could have just posted pictures of my finished product and swooned about how fun it was to make them, but that just wasn't the case this time. Honesty is important for me and I know you all appreciate an honest blogger too. Are there any things you absolutely hate to do, even if the payoff is sometimes worth it? I'd love to know that I'm not the only one here that doesn't like multi-step projects.